Friday the 13th may not have been the first slasher film I ever saw (that’s either The Hills Have Eyes Part II or Elm Street 3) but it was my 92 minute Citizen Kane.

In what is arguably the film’s standout slaying, a pre-fame Kevin Bacon relaxes in post-coital bliss and, when Marcie’s gone to the bathroom and her own fate, a drop of blood from the body hidden in the top bunk plops on to his forehead.

Before he can figure out what it is, where it came from, or what his career prospects are, the killer’s hand clamps his head back and a spearhead drives up through his throat in a truly horrible manner, tentpoling the skin of his neck until it splits and blood spurts (in a possible reference to ejaculation?) from the wound, into his mouth (looking like a bendy straw in pic. 3), and wiggles about until he’s dead. As dead as Ned. Ned’s who’s dead and above the bed.

It’s a definitive slasher movie kill and everything that’s good about Friday the 13th as a brand and a concept. But truly, truly, icky.

MASK MAKER

2010/18/87m

“Meet your maker.”

A.k.a. Maskerade

Director: G.E. Furst / Writers: Eric Miller, Jake Kennedy, G.E. Furst / Cast: Nikki DeLoach, Stephen Colletti, Terry Kiser, Michael Berryman, Treat Williams, Anabella La Casanova, Ross Britz, Mariah Bonner, A.J. Allegra, Lara Grice, Jonathan Breck, Jason London.

Body Count: 14

Dire-logue: “Are you taking me to a remote location where you plan on murdering me for my birthday?”

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I’ve often said that a surefire way to produce a decent slasher film these days is simply to pick n’ mix good parts of other decent slasher films and mold a pastiche together like a giant playdough ball of grue.

Finally, someone’s done that.

Make no mistake, Mask Maker has zilch orginality to it. Almost nothing happens that hasn’t happened before in some forgotten B movie nobody cares to remember. But what the Mask Maker makers have done is stitch together these little motifs and scenarios, set-ups and shots, and create a well above average (in post-millennium terms), none-too-pretentious body count pic – just the kind of thing I needed after what has seemed like a long drought of good horror fare.

Many will say “Dude, this sucks! It’s got nothing going for it,” but in the absence of anything new TO DO with slasher movies, at least what is done here has some competence and logic to it.

How’s this for the story? In what I thought was the 1800s – but was, in fact, 1961 – a madcap woman kidnaps someone’s baby to sacrifice it in order to restore life/immortality/whatnot to a bandaged up figure. She succeeds, but is hanged by the angry townsfolk and bandage dude – her son – is skewered with some sacred Native American stick-thing and buried.

An aerial shot of a college campus accompanied by alt rock tells us we’re now in the present and economically-minded birthday girl Jennifer is taken by her cutesy boy-t0y Evan to claim her birthday present: the house where all the 1800s-1961-really shizzle went down. She’s displeased, acts like a bitch about it, and then learns it’s a real fixer upper, only cost $10,000 and has forty acres of land with it. She’s then happy. And apologises.

Friends come down for the weekend to help clean up and one of them totters into the cemetery on the grounds and yanks out the Native American sacred stick-thing, hexing the lot of ‘em. Bandage-dude, whom we learn is called Leonard from a series of flashbacks where Treat Williams (!) is screwing around with the boy’s mom, rises again and starts to kill the newcomers.

Mask Maker has a bit of a fractured structure and I wasn’t entirely sure if we’d been clued in on everything that was going on. Bernie himself, Terry Kiser, mumbles through an exposition about what happened in ’61 and tells Jennifer to get out of ‘The Old Tucker Place’ (“He’ll kill you all!” etc) but by then it’s too late for most of her friends, who have been slashed, axed and pitchforked dead by Leonard, who then rips off their facial epidermis (with surprising ease) and wears them to torment the next victim.

Considering how seen-it-all-before things get, director Furst manages to wring a lot of energy and even a fair whack of tension from familiar scenes. There’s a great chase, for once involving a fleeing guy rather than the usual squealing girl, and when Jen finally discovers the carnage, she puts on her final girl shoes and goes for broke, making all the right decisions until thwarted by the hulking maniac.

Eventually, things go by way of Friday the 13th Part 2 (and even Humongous) as she dons mother’s dress to fool Leonard into believing she’s returned from the grave; this is then followed up by a copy of the ‘machete-slide’ climax of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.The face-peeling schtick throws up reminders of the Texas Chainsaw remakes and low-bud DVD flick Scarred, though mercifully they hold back on extreme close-ups of a slow-rip from the skull here.

So, deformed, mute, son with overbearing love for psychotic, unhinged mother, eh? Chuck in Michael Berryman’s handyman (who works at Pluto’s World of Goods!!!) with a few sage words here and there, Jason London’s rather pointless cameo, Native American burial rituals, an old diary with all the answers, a full moon, T&A, and a requisite ‘twist’ that practically sounds a foghorn to let you know it’s coming, and there’s little else you need in a straight-up slasher movie.

Insignificant though it may be -  and downright laughable to anyone who’s recently watched The Cabin in the Woods - I really enjoyed Mask Maker. It’s like a narrative montage of good bits from great teenie-kill pics and that is certainly not a bad thing by any standards, merely a comfortably predictable one.

It also made me want to sing ‘mask maker’ to the tune of the Kids from Fame’s ‘Starmaker’. Further proof of its evident superiority.

Blurbs-of-interest: Terry Kiser was Dr Crews in Friday the 13th Part VII; Jonathan Breck played The Creeper in both Jeepers Creepers films and was also in The Caretaker; Jason London was in Killer Movie and The Rage: Carrie 2; Michael Berryman was Pluto (you see??) in both of the original Hills Have Eyes movies and was also in Deadly Blessing and Penny Dreadful.

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THE JACKHAMMER MASSACRE

2003/18/89m

“Self destruction is only the beginning.”

A.k.a. Jackhammer

Director/Writer: Joe Castro / Writer: Dan Benton / Cast: Aaron Gaffey, Kyle Yaskin, Nadia Angelini, Bart Burson, Trudy Kofahl, Jill Moore, Evan Owen, Desi O’Brian.

Body Count: 9

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Another low-end Castro production, but the budget is up from Maniacal and Butchered this time.

A young man – contrivedly named Jack – spirals into drug dependency, following the fatal overdose of his friend and, when a couple of thuggish debt collectors turn up at the warehouse he lives/works in and inject him with a fusion of lethal shit, he embarks on a hallucinogenic-fuelled killing spree without having to leave the confines of the building, as a succession of luckless nobodies turn up for various reasons – one of whom gets the jackhammer up her arse!

The first half hour attempts to build depth into the story, but as soon as the bodies start dropping it all descends into the usual sloppy gorefest, complete with amateur-night performances and the longest power cable in the world, supplying an electrical flow for the titular weapon.

Still, on some level it’s worth admiring Castro’s passion for the genre, though you might want to ensure you’re on some kind of acid trip of your own if you want to wring much enjoyment from this one.

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“Turn around slowly because…”

SHADOWS RUN BLACK

1981/18/85m

Director: Howard Heard / Writers: Craig Kusaba & Duke Howard / Cast: William J. Kulzer, Elizabeth Trosper, Shea Porter, Julius Metoyer, Dianne Hinkler, Kevin Costner.

Body Count: 10

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Beware those films where actors and crew overlap!

Had it not been for the burgeoning stardom of a one-scene bit-parter, it’s questionable whether Shadows Run Black would have ever seen the light of day after its initial run (if it even had one).

Crappy though this slasher-detective hybrid is, I found my copy for £1 and sold it to some crazy German Costner-phile for £18.

A ski-masked killer is doing in girls who share a history of drug-dabbling. His next target is the pretty, though wholly unconvincing, Judy, whose older brother hates her black boyfriend Billy (played by the associate producer and sporting a fantastic Village People handlebar moustache). Big brother’s wife is also screwing around with another guy. Sucks to be him.

Sucks even more to the viewer. From the entirely obvious identity of the killer to the fact that every on-screen female victim gets naked – and STAYS naked to walk around the house, investigating strange noises.

Fervent misogyny and beyond-shit production quality team up to drag this sucker further downhill, through some bushes, into a ravine, and down a sinkhole, after an okay opening slaying.

Costner is a red-herring cowboy, barely recognisable in his appearance, his name suspiciously absent from the end credits, which appear to be manually typed on to the screen by some frantic intern, reaching the end of the line and slamming enter in time with the dismal score.

But it’s still better than The Postman.

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Vegan Voorhees LOVES a good final girl. I’ve read people attempt to remove the need for a final girl in a slasher film over the years (“women are only good for dying” etc). These people are stupid. A slasher film without a final girl or a killer is almost always crap.

So, anyway, here – in no particular order – are ten of VeVo’s favourite horror heroines:

Molly Nagel (Renée Estevez)

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Cutesy camper Molly is pretty much the only good girl at Camp Rolling Hills, under the watch of puritanical/homicidal/transsexual camp counsellor Angela, who rather indiscriminately “sends home” all of those who don’t act like a good young person should. Molly’s fate is left a bit up in the air, but from a throwaway line of dialogue in the third movie, it seems like she didn’t make it : (

There’s nothing particularly outstanding about Molly as a character: she adheres to all the assembly line clichés of the role in her goody-two-shoes way, but Estevez is winsome in the part.

Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals)

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

Plucky reporter Taylor and her crew of two follow burgeoning mass murderer Leslie Vernon, who intends to rid the archetypal small town of Glen Echo of its surplus teenage population. However, he’s been leading the crew a merry ride by pretending he’s already picked his “survivor girl”, but it turns out he intended to face off with Taylor all along.

Her realisation of her placement as the final girl is something of a great moment in Leslie Vernon, and Taylor takes to the task with veritable gusto, besting Les in classic FG stylee.

Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt)

Urban Legend (1998)

Secretive Natalie is the numero uno target of the Parka-clad killer who’s stalking the campus of Pendleton University, offing her friends in inventive fashions. While she is naive enough to believe that it’s all something to do with a murder spree that occurred there twenty-five years earlier, deep down she must know that the bad thing she once did has come back to bite her in the ass!

Some people considered Alicia Witt miscast for the role, but her ‘bad fit’ is why she’s such a great final girl. Instead of the usual bubbly blonde chick or moody brunette ‘with issues’, Natalie is a booksmart, guilt-laden character who is eventually forced to shoot her best friend.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Halloween (1978)

The original final girl, Laurie Strode survived the murder sprees of Michael Myers on three separate occasions. But everyone remembers her best as the babysitter from heaven in John Carpenter’s original flick. Laurie is comprised of all the elements that make the final girl: she’s watchful, ever so slightly paranoid, virtuous, shy, and genuine.

Curtis played the lead role in other slasher films, but she never again scaled the heights of empathy that Laurie evoked as WE joined her in terror as she ran, hid, and eventually fought back.

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

In Carol Clover’s book Men, Women & Chain Saws, she calls Nancy the ‘grittiest’ of the final girls. Wes Craven wrote his heroine as more reactive than most (something that follows through into the Scream movies); as her friends fall victim to dream stalker Freddy Krueger, Nancy resolves to take the fight to him. She purposefully goes looking for him in her dreams and, when she figures out how she can kick his ass, rigs several traps using household items, and unleashes it all upon her would-be killer.

The can’t-sleep motif at the centre of the Elm Street opus helps characterise Nancy as a great final girl: her folks believe she’s crazy, the doctors think she’s crazy, and even she begins to question her own sanity after more than seven days without sleep. But her paranoia wins through and Nancy emerges as the only survivor.

To emphasise just how good she is, watch the 2010 remake for Rooney Mara’s bad cover version.

Ginny Field (Amy Steel)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

Assistant camp counsellor trainer and child psyche major Ginny meets all the functions of the standard final girl and blows most the competition out of the water. Ginny ‘senses’ the presence of something not quite right about the camp and is the only one who takes the threat of “a Jason” seriously. She crawls through windows, hides under bunks, wets her pants in fear, and finally uses her child psychology skills to fool Jason into thinking she’s mommy.

It’s difficult to list exactly what about Amy Steel is so appealing. Essentially, she does very little that her sisters-in-terror don’t. Her performance is neither racked with emotion or personal loss, but she simply seems to fit the mold almost perfectly, doing all the things we want her to do and coming out the other side with her life intact. She’s plucky without being annoying, tough without it seeming unlikely, and smart without being cocky.

Erin (Jessica Biel)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Michael Bay’s remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic (which I’m not all that fond of), changed the leading lady from shrieking victim into a can-d0 ladette with growing star Jessica Biel convincing enough as a reformed juvie-hall probie whose road trip through Texas in 1973 becomes a nightmare of epic proportions.

Is it likely girls would have acted this way forty years ago? Maybe not, but TCM barely reflects the era it’s set in anyway. The characterisations are sketchy and malleable to the 2003 audience, which means that Erin pretty much steps through a time warp from modern post-Ripley female warrior ideals to do battle with Leatherface and family. But she’s appealing nevertheless. I was toing and froing between her or Eliza Dushku in Wrong Turn, but I think Erin just about has it.

Jess Bradford (Olivia Hussey)

Black Christmas (1974)

Sensible and ever so slightly moody Jess turns out to be the final girl in the pre-everything scare-a-thon that is Black Christmas. Secretly pregnant by her highly strung boyfriend and concerned about the disappearance of a sorority sister and the stream of obscene phone calls their sorority house keeps receiving, Jess is under a fair bit of pressure from several angles.

Olivia Hussey was quite a big name when she made this film, but as it predates the conventions of the genre by some years, her eventual uprising as the heroine isn’t the cliché it would be now. Jess isn’t the ‘nicest’ girl in the group, she’s evidently not a virgin, and doesn’t want to compromise over the planned abortion of the child. In short, this kind of girl would NEVER be the heroine if the film were made these days. Still, these points only serve to define her character as realistic (as are most of those in this one) and so she becomes a good, ‘outside the box’ final girl in a similar way to Natalie in Urban Legend.

Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi)

Final Exam (1981)

In this tame post-Halloween campus-slasher, the killer stalking a group of college kids has no apparent motive and, in a reflection of this randomness, the nominal heroine, Courtney, becomes so by a similar lottery-of-gloom. Unlike many of her kin in this list, there’s not much to know about her: She’s the nice, conventionally pretty girl who constantly seems to be providing an ear for her friends’ various problems, whilst worrying about exams and wondering if she has a weak personality.

Eventually, all those extroverts who don’t care about their own personalities are knife-fodder and Courtney ends up running for her life around a deserted campus, until she is forced to fight back and, literally, get her hands dirty. Very dirty. In this straight-forward film, it’s nice to have an equally straight-forward character outlasting everyone else.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)

Scream 1-4 (1996-2011)

Last but by no means least, the final girl who just keeps getting put through the ringer. If you were Sidney Prescott, you’d be quite pallid of character and wear lots of dark coloured, sensible clothes too. Her mom was raped and murdered, first boyfriend turns out to be the one who did it, then he tries to kill her, then his MOTHER tries to kill her, then her mystery half-brother confesses to have been playing puppetmaster all along. Then, when she’s had a decade of rest, her own cousin tries to kill her!

Blood runs thicker than water, and Sidney’s sure seen more of it than most. But she copes, she fights and she survives every time despite tremendous odds against her: One final girl against a total of seven different psycho killers. I was never that keen on her in the first movie, she seemed too obvious, but as more and more of her buddies flatlined, she became gradually more mysterious and put-upon, which made me like her more. Plus she’s stuck it out and done four movies, more than anyone else in the same predicament.

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My friend Eve is scared of birds. She runs away from them. Isn’t it weird how mammals of our size can be freaked out by such tiny creatures: spiders, bees, scuttling scorpions? Most of these critters have been at the centre of some Nature’s Revenge film of some sort. Jaws is probably the most responsible culprit but, even twelve years earlier, Hitchcock had unleashed an unstoppable tirade of winged attackers on the human population of California.

‘Tis The Birds, 1963′s finest killer-bird film. Hitchcock really pushes the extent of his abilities, namely making the ordinary somehow unsettling. Bodega Bay – like Amity Island in 1975 – is a colourful, quaint little cove of a place, chock full of happy people, pretty architecture and a slow pace of life, soon to be invaded by ‘our friends’ the birds…

And he does it all without a single note of music.

This scene rates as one of the best in the movie: Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), goes to the Bodega Bay School and finds that a huge flock of birds are waiting outside. Waiting for the children… The children who are inside the school singing some creepy pigglety pagglety mow mow mow song.

They flee, the birds scatter, beaks peck at kiddies. In modern movies, kids are hardly ever short of irritating, fucking obnoxious little brats who always evade serious injury. The Bodega Bay Class of ’63 – including 12-year-old Veronica Cartwright – are cute, well-behaved sprogs and we wish them no harm, making the scene that whole lot more scary.

Hitchcock was never one for standard eerie imagery – shadows, long slow pans et al – but he was masterful in extracting the creepy from all other avenues, this being a prime example.

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NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CLASS REUNION

1982/18/82m

“No class has less class than this class.”

Director: Michael Miller / Writer: John Hughes / Cast: Gerrit Graham, Michael Lerner, Fred McCarren, Shelley Smith, Miriam Flynn, Stephen Furst, Blackie Dammett, Marla Pennington, Zane Buzby, Marya Small, Art Evans, Barry Diamond, Steve Tracy, Anne Ramsay, Chuck Berry.

Body Count: 4

Dire-logue: “Somebody do something – the reunion’s bombing!”

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John Hughes will forever be fondly remembered as the king of teen films in the 80s. He gave us teen-angst in The Breakfast Club, teen romance in Pretty in Pink, and teen-confidence in Ferris Bueller. What did he bring us in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion? Certainly nothing to laugh about.

It’s another bogus reunion, organised by another bogus killer in this bogus comedy from the hit n’ miss caverns of National Lampoon. In this case, the Lizzie Borden High Class of ’72 return to their now abandoned school a decade after graduation. There, they are stalked by a loon masked by a paper bag in revenge for a Terror Train-like prank played on him at their senior prom.

Unfortunately for the viewing audience, he only does away with a measly four victims – all of whom are killed off camera – while ancillary characters are allotted long inconsequential scenes in a wasted attempt to extract some giggles. Although there are a couple of amusing lines, the whole film plays like a waste of time and one might suspect Hughes didn’t actually watch any slasher films to try and make the spoofing accurate, rather than sticking to bland gags about demonic possession, blindness, dope, and cowardice.

A good cast is wasted (not to mention spared). Skip it and go straight to Pandemonium.

Blurbs-of-interest: Gerrit Graham was in Child’s Play 2; Stephen Furst was also in The Unseen and Silent Rage (also directed by Michael Miller); Michael Lerner was in Maniac Cop 2.

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